Recently, the use of application containers has become an increasingly popular way of executing applications on a host computer. A container provides for the isolation of a group of processes from the others on an operating system. By making use of existing operating system functionality (such as Linux name spaces), containers maintain their own private view of the operating system, file system structure, and network interfaces. Containers share the operating system kernel with other processes, but can be constrained to some extent to use an amount of resources such as the central processing unit (CPU), random access memory (RAM), or input/output (I/O) devices. Containers have proven advantageous because they typically have a small system “footprint.” That is, containers provide a relatively thin encapsulation layer above and beyond any applications contained therein. Thus, instantiation and deployment of containers is relatively quick.
Virtual machines, on the other hand, tend to deploy more slowly than containers. This is due to the fact that virtual machines are a software abstraction of a physical computer. Thus, a virtual machine typically includes a guest operating system and a virtual hardware platform. These virtualized system components are not present in containers. However, virtual machines are advantageous because a higher degree of isolation and security may be achieved between virtual machines as opposed to the degree of isolation that may be achieved between containers. As such, there are drawbacks to using container-based and operating-system-level virtualization.